Anti-Windows Catalog
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Anti-Windows Catalog
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Microsoft Monoculture and Morris' Ultimate LessonWritten by Gordon Fecyk, 4/26/2006
ABOUT 95% OF THE WORLD runs Windows on their desktop. That won't change any time soon. Deal with it. Kelly Martin of SecurityFocus wrote this memorable paragraph while describing a polluted Internet. I need to borrow this paragraph for a moment to demonstrate why I'm not pro-Microsoft so much as I'm anti-bad-design. The Register followed the European Commission's lawsuit against Microsoft Corporation since its beginning. Among other things, Andrew Orlowski suggests Microsoft is trying to use anti-trust legislation as a shield against legitimate competition. They successfully did so against the US Department of Justice only a few short years ago. Anti-trust legislation is supposed to prevent abuse of monopoly power in an economy. I'm no economist and I'm no lawyer, but anything that prevents healthy business competition gets a resounding F-minus-minus from me. Microsoft should indeed get publicly spanked for their abuse of their Windows monopoly. But to blame Microsoft for all of the ills of the Internet -- viruses, spy ware, fraud, "bot-nets," and so on -- just because they abuse their Windows monopoly in the name of profit? I draw the line right there.
Anti-Microsoft activists love to throw this word around when they describe all of the ills of the Internet. Used in a typical sentence: Microsoft has nurtured a software "monoculture" that threatens global computer security. They also conveniently forget that virus writers write bad software for other systems. And the idea that fraud can occur on any computer system, simply because fraudsters are taking advantage of the weaknesses in users, doesn't phase the anti-Microsoft crowd.
We didn't even have a monoculture of UNIX systems back then, either. We had AT&T UNIX, Berkely UNIX, and the beginnings of the GNU Project. We had VAX and Sun servers. Yet the Morris Worm affected all of these diverse systems, because they all connected to the ultra-common Internet. Please read the fascinating history of this worm, then make sure you're sitting down before you read the last paragraph about the lessons learned: UNIX itself was never designed with security as its highest priority, but designed for ease of use. hah hah hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha... I don't know what the typical Linux religious fanatic believes, but I wouldn't suggest that UNIX, or any of its derivatives, were designed for ease of use! But hey, you can always do a word-swap of "UNIX" with "Windows," and "Morris" with, oh, say "Code Red," and you'll have a remarkably accurate story from 2001.
And what is the Morris Worm's ultimate lesson? It doesn't matter how unique your system is. You negate that uniqueness the moment you connect to the ultra-common Internet. You can't blame Microsoft's abuse of the marketplace for the ills of the Internet. Your real problem is the Internet itself. You want uniqueness? You want diversity? You want to avoid the Internet monoculture? Right now, safe computing is very unique among Windows users. Virus writers, spyware writers, and even multi-national conglomerates don't know how to write code for it. You still won't avoid fraudulent e-mail, simply because there will always be fraudsters on any medium, but that's neither the Internet's fault nor Microsoft's fault. Yes, it will mean changing your computing habits, and it will mean changing your choices of software and devices, and it will mean actually thinking about what you do on the Internet. But it won't mean changing your computer, operating system or browser. It really is too bad the authors of the Morris Worm's history didn't realize this. Instead they blamed ease of use, when the fact is, the worm didn't require any user to actually do anything. "Ease of use," indeed. Related Links:
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